Places Have Memories

Do places have memories and how shall we treat and question them? ‘Rotterdam Weg’, a project by the Spanish artist Carme Nogueira, tries to reflect over these topics in a long, interactive trip with the city, where she finds and tells us stories about the particular places she visits.

It is nice to see how she imitates the fading process of memories using chalks to draw sentences on the streets that are related to photos or documents she found about what really happened in that place. It makes sense to ask questions about what art can do for the memory of places in the city and how can it really interact with the history.

But what also immediately caught my attention is the similarity of the process with another, more contemporary form of spreading memories, which is Google Buzz. Although it may sound strange to compare such different medias, the Buzz system works as a remote amplifier for your feelings in a particular place, leaving your memories in a virtual space related to the one where you are, for a limited lapse of time. Buzz is an open network of geographically located personal news, that can be seen by anybody else using the software.

Even though, a virtual system like this does not leave its mark in the city, creating instead a sort of parallel world with no traces outside the iPhone. Shouldn’t we instead pick up chalks and go all out to write our memories? ‘Rotterdam Weg’ images and related thoughts are published in a limited number as a nice collection of posters and were showed in an exhibition in the same city of Rotterdam. You can find more informations about the project here.

Flying Grass Carpet is a huge carpet entirely made of artiﬁcial grass. It ﬂies over the world as a temporary landscape, to land in all kinds of places where an extension of the landscape is needed. I visited the Flying Grass Carpet in Amsterdam, and talked about it with some people hanging around. The initial astonishment of most visitors was surprising: “Flying carpet? But… how does it ﬂy?” That of course is the secret of this new instant landscape.

Axel Timm is one of the founders of the Berlin-based office Raumlabor. Raumlabor is currently working in Rotterdam to prepare their latest project for the ‘Wereld van Witte de With’ festival, which will take place between 14 and 16 September. The festival’s theme for this year is ‘The Street – Live!’, focusing on new ways to use and experience public spaces. We asked Timm five questions about Raumlabor, his views on enhancing public space, and ‘Limousine Service’, the office’s current intervention on the streets of Rotterdam.

Last summer we reported about the Flying Grass Carpet, the huge pop-up landscape entirely made of artificial grass. The project of our friends, Rotterdam-based architecture and design office HUNK-design and artist IDEddy has been travelling the world since.

Two days ago Twitter platform developers announced to launch a new, revolutionary component in Twittersphere: location. A geodata team is working on an API that makes it possible to map tweets physically. The idea is explained on the official Twitter blog: “We’re gearing up to launch a new feature which makes Twitter truly location-aware. A…